Such systems are known in principle from prior art and are used particularly in filling systems. There, containers such as bottles or cans are filled in rapid succession and supplied one after another to a monitoring scale for the filled amount to be determined.
Such a filling device is known from DE 195 13 103 A1. Therein, containers are filled and supplied to at least one star wheel of a scale, to then be conveyed further. The star wheel has individual pockets formed to accommodate the individual containers, so that the containers can be conveyed by contact with the pocket walls and moved onto a circular track.
It proves disadvantageous, in this case, that frictional engagement with the star wheel during weighing must be prevented to determine the filled weight, i.e., the container must be released on the weighing platform. For this purpose, the star wheel is rotated backwards by a certain amount after each of the aforementioned steps, so that the container stands upright to be weighed contact-free on the weighing platform. After the weighing process has finished, the star wheel again rotates forwards in the conveyance direction and conveys the next container to be weighed onto the scale.
Even though spurious forces can be prevented by back-rotation of the star wheel, this process is not sufficient for the ever-higher transport speeds of modern filling systems. In the latter, the mass or inertia of the filled containers causes them to slip tangentially by a certain amount after the star wheel has finished a conveyance cycle, so that their final rest position is not accurately predictable. Consequently, it can happen that, during the planned slight back-rotation of the star wheel, the leading pocket wall can come back into contact with the container that has slid against it, so that a spurious force occurs and the weight cannot be precisely determined.